He hadn’t so much as asked to go along as simply gone. The Witcher hadn’t said a word to him until they were miles from the village. At the time, Jaskier had assumed this was a good sign. It wasn’t that he didn’t take “no” for an answer -- he did, frequently, often loudly, sometimes forcibly. But when you are used to “no”, silence sounds suspiciously like “yes”.
They were deep in the mountains before the Witcher finally answered a question, which Jaskier took as a positive sign. When Jaskier asked, for at least the third time, what they were hunting, the Witcher had growled, “Not ‘we’. Me.”
“Alright,” Jaskier replied, shifting his lute protectively. “Just as well. You do the fighting. I’ll do the telling.”
The Witcher growled an inarticulate and hard-to-construe-as-friendly response.
"Do I get to know your name? Kind of important, if I'm going to write a ballad about you."
The Witcher had glared at him. "Geralt," he'd said, and that was the end of that conversation. It struck Jaskier as a strange name, somehow. It was almost mundane. In his head, in the song that Jaskier was already composing, he remained simply 'the Witcher'.
Geralt had left the campsite early, before the sun rose. Jaskier woke alone, to fleeting flashbacks of other mornings with denied goodbyes. But the Witcher had left a bag behind, which had to mean he was coming back. So Jaskier spent the morning fighting with the damp firewood instead of a monster, coaxing the logs into flame just strong enough to warm his hands if he leaned in close. He fiddled with the lute for several hours -- it was so easy to lose himself in a new song on the best of days, and he enjoyed the way his voice bounced off the cliffs and back to him.
By mid-afternoon, he was wondering where the Witcher had gotten off to. Had he trekked several more miles before killing his -- what was it? -- his beastie? (He should have paid more attention in the inn. He could ask questions later, he supposed, as long as the Witcher actually came back.) Did it really take him that long to best a monster? Perhaps the monster was particularly good at hiding when it wasn’t ravaging local villages or destroying crops or whatever.
Jaskier ate a cold dinner and went to bed as soon as the sun had set. He’d give it through the night until the next midday, he thought. He and his lute and his limited supply of food could only keep him company on this mountainside for so long.
Jaskier woke to the sound of heavy breathing punctuated by snapping twigs. He tensed, his back to the noise.
Something heavy hit the ground.
He scrambled around to find not a monster or a bear, as he’d expected, but the Witcher, sprawled a few steps from the campfire, his limbs arrayed unnaturally beneath him.
Heart pounding, Jaskier stood. “Witcher?” He called. “Hey, are you --”
He nudged the man’s shoulder with his foot, the horrible feeling that he would have to Do Something rising inside him.
He dropped to his knees and shook the man by the shoulder. “Geralt?” he said, desperation growing, “you’re not supposed to do this. C’mon, now, wake up.”
But Geralt didn’t respond. Jaskier pressed two fingers into his neck and waited. It is hard to find a pulse when your own is pounding ferociously, especially one as slow as a Witcher's. Although it was slow, it was there.
Relieved by the presence of the pulse Jaskier sank back on his heels, forced himself to take a breath. It took considerable effort on his part to roll Geralt onto his back and drag his limbs out straight. He smelled blood and found his hands were smeared with it.
Jaskier wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and made himself assess the damage.
The bard wasn't used to blood. He'd gotten pushed around, of course. He’d smashed his head against pretty girls’ headboards and bruised ribs on the corners of bar tables and fallen into doorframes after one too many drinks.
But blood like this -- soaked through the Witcher’s shirt, making mud of the dirt beneath him, sticky on his hands -- this was new.
“It’ll make for a good story,” said the songwriter’s part of his mind.
“Not if the Witcher dies, it won’t,” said the sensible part.
He looked from the unconscious man’s face to the blood that was quickly drying beneath his fingernails. “Not if you kill the Witcher.”
He scrambled to remove the light armor, leaving just the black shirt covering the wounds. Gingerly, Jaskier peeled up the fabric. There were three deep stab wounds in Geralt's side, as if a giant beast had picked him up with dagger-sized claws and shaken him. The fabric had been sucked into the deep holes in the Witcher’s abdomen in places, pasted against the ragged edges. Jaskier didn’t know much about medicine and even less about how Witchers worked. He did know that this couldn’t be good and so, bile rising, he worked the fabric free with the edge of a knife.
Light-headed, Jaskier sat back and stared up at the sky. The sun was creeping up over the mountain, tinging the horizon a dainty rose. The damp morning air smelled of blood.
He took a swig of his own water before dumping out the contents of the Witcher’s bags. The one contained mostly empty or half-empty bottles, unlabled, with unidentifiable contents. In the other he found what he was looking for -- a skin pouch filled with drinking water. “Sorry,” he muttered, “but we can get more water later,” then poured the contents out over the Witcher’s wounds.
The dried blood loosened with the water. Jaskier, more for the feeling that he was doing something helpful than any real sense of utility, cleaned the undamaged skin around the wounds with a clean corner of the Witcher’s shirt.
He was feeling quite proud of himself until red started welling up in the wounds again.
A wave of panicked inspiration hit him and he emptied the remains of his wine over the wounds, then pressed the fabric down in an attempt to staunch the blood.
Perhaps as a response to the pressure on the wounds, Geralt tensed. Jaskier could have whooped with joy. “You’re alive!”
The Witcher blinked slowly, one hand moving slowly toward his stomach. Jaskier gently batted it aside. “You, ah. Probably don’t want to do that.”
But Geralt pushed Jakier’s hand away, replacing it with his own against his injured side. “What did you put on it?” he grunted.
“Well, I washed it,” Jaskier said, a bit petulantly. He really didn’t have to apologize for doing his best, he told himself. “You looked in a bad way.”
“It’ll be fine. I already took everything that will help. Just have to wait a bit.” He tried to push himself up on an elbow, winced, let himself back down. “Are you drunk?”
“What? No!”
The Witcher narrowed his eyes.
"Why?"
"It smells of wine."
“Oh, that. I maybe washed the wounds with wine, as well as water?”
The Witcher laughed sharply, winced again. A rivulet of blood ran from beneath the cloth.
“I did my best!” Jaskier insisted. “I’ve never had a near-dead Witcher stumble into my campsite in the wee hours of the morning, leaking out the side.” He flicked a pebble. “Probably saved your life.” He felt a little silly now, for being so worried.
“You didn’t,” the Witcher replied. “I still would have gotten better.” He readjusted the compress and closed his eyes.
“But slower,” Jaskier kept pressing. “And with more shirt on your insides. I had to pull bits out.”
The Witcher was silent for a while, which Jaskier chose to interpret as conceding the point.
“Red bottle,” Geralt said finally.
Jaskier shook himself from his trance. “What?”
“In my bag.”
Jaskier popped the top off of the bottle and handed it to the Witcher. He didn’t bother sitting up, tipping the whole thing into his mouth while still prone.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Do I fucking look like I want to tell you a story right now?”
“Sorry, sorry.” Jaskier pulled his legs up beneath him. He sat there in silence, keeping watch as the sun continued to rise.
Midmorning, Geralt hauled himself to his feet. Still holding his side, he began shoving empty bottles and loose armor into his bag.
“What are you doing?” Jaskier began scrambling for his own belongings.
“Going to town.”
“Now?”
“Might as well.”
"You're sure you're alright?"
Geralt looked at him, sword in one hand, the other still pressed to his side. “You shouldn’t start worrying about Witchers, bard. It’s not worth it.”
Jaskier huffed and slung his lute into its familiar spot.
He could be the judge of that, he thought.